The great breakfast dilemma: should baked beans be part of a full English?

A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon crispiness, egg doneness and whether baked beans are a vital component or just spoil the whole thing.

Felicity Cloake is a writer after my own heart: she is not a fan of beans with her full English. ‘I object to the way they encroach on everything,’ she writes in Red Sauce Brown Sauce, and then quotes Alan Partridge on the importance of ‘distance between the eggs and the beans. I may want to mix them, but I want that to be my decision. Use a sausage as a breakwater.’ Or, as one pseudonymous contributor remarked on the London Review of Breakfasts blog:

Beans are to the cooked breakfast as the Dutch Mercenary Forces were to the Royal Netherlands Indies Army. Keep them in check and they will perform unglamorous but vital tasks about the empire of the fry-up; sweetening sausage, lubricating toast… Exert insufficient discipline upon them, however, and they will soon exhibit their mania for chaos… they engulf an egg… they drown bacon…Your breakfast paradise becomes a gooey mess.

Now there’s someone who has really thought about the humble baked bean. Not as much, though, as a character Cloake meets on her travels who runs a baked bean museum from his council flat in Port Talbot. He’s so bean-obsessed that he changed his name from Barry Kirk to Captain Beany by deed poll. Beany caught hypothermia after spending 100 hours in a bath of cold baked beans in an attempt to set the world record. He raised more than £1,500 for charity but didn’t make it into the Guinness World Records book ‘because they hadn’t supplied anyone to certify the record’.